


Baby Pictures

by IguanaMadonna



Category: Kai Gracen - Rhys Ford
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-08-26 09:36:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16679116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IguanaMadonna/pseuds/IguanaMadonna
Summary: Ryder and Najiri look at Kai's baby pictures.





	Baby Pictures

**Author's Note:**

> Attention Wranglers, please place this in the Books section! Thank you for all your hard work on this site :)

Kai was finally resting—after he and Alexa pilled the elfin Stalker like a cat—and now there was nothing to do but watch and wait. Ryder slumped on the couch, keeping his eyes pinned on his beloved. Kai had a talent for getting into trouble, and trouble left him broken open and bleeding out as it so often did. Ryder had coaxed one of his healers into healing Kai's most dangerous injuries, but his beloved's chimera nature, both sidhe and unsidhe, sent them running from the room. He sighed, at least there wasn't a dead dragon this time. Ryder was just getting settled in when someone knocked on the door.

A beautiful human woman, with ebony dark skin and finely braided waist-length hair, stood on the other side of the door. Ryder remembered her, she was one of the wives of the fabulously fertile Jonas, one of Kai's Stalker friends. He'd gotten hints—based on how often Kai talked about and teamed up with the other Stalker—that his beloved considered him, and therefore his wives and husbands and numerous children, family. Of a sort. So Ryder opened the door. The woman greeted him with a regal nod, carrying in a ceramic pot full of... well, Ryder still wasn't good at identifying human food, but it smelled good. No doubt Kai would enjoy it.

She nodded to him. “Ryder, yes?”

“Yes,” he said. “You are... Najiri?”

She smiled. “Yes. Is he awake?”

Ryder shook his head. “We made him take pain medicine.” 

Najiri tsked, and flicked a look over Ryder's unmarred form. “He must be bad off.”

Ryder shrugged, “My cousin helped.”

Najiri nodded and placed the pot in Kai's rather bare refrigerator. She turned, and gave him a speculative look. “Jonas said you are... interested in him.”

That was one way to put it. Kai made Ryder's blood and bones resonate. Ryder knew Kai felt the same way, but the elfin Stalker was willful and stubborn and refused to act on it, much to Ryder's endless frustration. Ryder shrugged. “He is the other half of my soul.”

She gave him a thoughtful look, and then waggled a finger at him. “I have something for you,” she said, heading toward the door. “Hold on.”

“Sit,” she said as she came in a few minutes later, holding a tablet. Najiri waved him to the couch near Kai's bed. Ryder gave a cautious look at his beloved, but between his injuries, the healing spell, and the drugs Kai was still out cold. Good. Gingerly Ryder sat down. Najiri plopped down next to him with an exaggerated sigh, and turned the tablet on. It took her a couple minutes of sorting through photo albums to find what she was looking for. “Here,” she said, opening a picture.

“What is this?” he asked. The photo featured Kai curled up asleep in long grass, but something about him seemed... off. Or unfinished. He looked very thin—starved—and so, so young.

“Kai's baby pictures,” Najiri said.

“He's... not a baby.” 

The human woman laughed. “When a child comes into your home, parents usually take a lot of pictures,” she explained. “Or at least mothers do, men sometimes forget.”

“Ah,” Ryder said, looking at the picture again. “So you took this?”

Najiri shook her head. “Jonas, but only after I told him to. It was on their first trip north, to Oregon, which was, I think, two or three weeks after Dempsey won him in that poker game.” And Dempsey, it went without saying, wouldn't have bothered.

Ryder looked again, and felt his heart twist. Young Kai looked so fragile. After a moment Najiri swiped to the next picture. Kai, awake, and wearing a feral look, rather reminiscent of Kai's pet gargoyle/possible cat, when it was considering whether to demand food or claw the nearest biped. He was hunched into himself in a bathtub, covered in bubbles, and snarling at the camera. Both bubbles and water were stained pink with blood.

“Bath time,” Najiri said with a chuckle.

“Did he bite someone?”

She nodded. “Back then he bit a lot. It was why we didn't offer to take him from Dempsey.” Najiri gave him a sidelong look. “By then our marriage had several young children,” she said. Najiri sounded like she was begging for understanding. “We didn't know if he understood the difference between children and adults.”

“And you didn't want him to bite a baby,” Ryder finished for her. She nodded, looking a bit relieved. Najiri swiped again.

The next picture was a short video, and here Ryder learned what Kai meant when he said his younger self was “lower than a dog”. He hissed and spit like a wildcat whenever someone got too close to him, and watched everyone with wary eyes. And Kai was so thin, on the verge of starvation. Young Kai wasn't wearing a shirt, and when he turned Ryder got a glimpse of his back. The familiar scars were there, but worse, somehow. It took Ryder a moment to understand what he saw, and when he did bile rose to his throat. Those hateful iron bars and bolts that were currently lying on Kai's coffee table were, in that video, still under his skin. No wonder young Kai was so thin, or so distrustful. He must have been in constant pain.

Ryder played the video again, watching young Kai interact with the humans in it. Someone handed him a bowl of stew and a spoon. However “feral” he might have been, Kai understood how to eat with both. He also seemed to understand the conversation around him, reacting to a story with a hiss or a familiar snort of amusement when appropriate. He may have just been reading the emotional tones of the people around him, but Ryder didn't think so, at least not completely.

“When did he start speaking?” he asked.

“Jonas said it was about a year later,” Najiri said. In the video Kai finished his bowl, and Ryder felt his heart thump when a slightly younger Dempsey casually refilled it.

“You better eat, boy,” the man in the video said, pointing at the bowl. Kai hissed at him and ducked and snapped like a dog when the man reached over to ruffle his hair. “Eat,” Dempsey repeated and sat down next to whoever was filming, probably Jonas. “Jesus turn that thing off.”

“Good to know he was always so... spiky,” Ryder said dryly. Najiri laughed. Ryder swiped to the next photo.

Kai eating chocolate with a blissful expression on his face. Ryder made a mental note to try that next. Wasn't chocolate a lover's gift? Swipe. Kai and a large white and yellow puppy playing tug rope. It was such a happy scene that Ryder almost didn't notice his black eye or busted lip. Ryder sighed. He'd promised that he would try to understand what Kai saw in the human who raised him, but sometimes it was hard. Swipe. Kai, elbow deep in a dead black dog while Dempsey gestured with a knife, apparently showing him how to skin the things. Swipe. Kai, curled up asleep on the bench seat of a beat up old truck, a ratty blanket thrown over him. Swipe.

Kai, curled up in a younger version of Sparky's lap, his back a mass of white bandages, blood soaking through at points. A familiar tangle of blood-soaked iron bars and bolts sat in a cardboard box on the table next to them. Dempsey hovered nearby, frowning at the iron, and in his expression Ryder could see an echo of his own. Puzzled horror. Why did Kai's father do that to him? Why did he insert toxic metal into his own child's back? That was something Ryder was sure he would never understand, even if he discovered the reason. Kai's tear-streaked face looked peaceful, at least, and Ryder finally truly understood why he was so loyal to these three humans in particular. Dempsey may have given him a rough life that was likely abusive, in its own way, but it was still a life. He'd been fed, taught to care for himself, learned to play, and been cut free from his most visible chains. The fact that Dempsey thought a child should be raised using his fists was of less importance to Kai, all things considered.

And that was the saddest thing of all, that an abusive human Stalker who was more inclined to beat a child who needed help than comfort him was, somehow, a savior, an angel from heaven sent by some twisted god to save Kai from the torture chamber his father had raised him in. He sighed. Beside him Najiri stirred. He'd almost forgotten she was there.

“I have to go, Angus is on call at Medical tonight,” she said, and patted his arm. “Give me your link number and I'll share the folder with you.”

“Thank you,” Ryder said solemnly, “I really appreciate it.” He sent her the information and she smiled and stood up, he rose with her and followed her out, making sure she got into her car safely before closing the door, and locking it. Kai's neighborhood wasn't bad, but he was an elf living in a human area of the city, and it didn't do to take chances given how many people still remembered the Wars. When he returned to his vigil he found Kai awake, if foggy from the medication.

“Who was that?” the elfin Stalker grumbled, trying to get up and getting tangled in his blankets. Ryder moved to untangle him, and like usual Kai fought him, pushing against his help.

“Stop fighting me,” Ryder said, “and that was Najiri, she brought over food, and your baby pictures.”

Kai stopped struggling and let himself be tucked back into bed. He groaned, “Fuuuck, those things.”

“You were rather cute.” Ryder settled back down onto the couch. Kai snorted.

 

“Yeah, as cute as a rabid alley cat.”

Ryder sighed, “I wish you wouldn't sell yourself short, my love,” he said softly. Kai blinked at him, his amethyst-blue eyes foggy with exhaustion and pain. Ryder knelt by the head of Kai's bed and pressed his lips against his Stalker's forehead. Kai hissed at the contact, but let the sidhelord caress his face, running his fingers though Kai's raven-black hair.

“Ryder,” Kai whispered. His hand caught Ryder's wrist. Kai was too light and too hard, whipcord over bone and not much more. Ryder suspected that had more to do with the iron dust still trapped under his skin than his diet, but that didn't stop him from fussing over the Stalker from time to time.

“Go to sleep, ainle,” he said. “I'll be right here if you need anything.”

“Bastard,” Kai muttered, but he released Ryder's wrist and settled back down, sleep pulling his eyes shut.

**Author's Note:**

> vocab
> 
> ainle= wildcat
> 
>  
> 
> I really really like this series and I'm glad that a third book will be out in March. The first two are Black Dog Blues and Mad Lizard Mambo by Rhys Ford.


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